Jonathan van Wyk

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Jonathan van Wyk was the recipient of a transplanted kidney from Denise Darvall who was also the donor for the world's first heart transplant. Van Wyk was ten years old at the time.

Darvall died after being hit by a car on December 3, 1967. Her heart was transplanted that same day into Louis Washkansky by a surgical team headed by Professor Christiaan Barnard.

The kidney transplant was controversial at that time in apartheid South Africa because van Wyk was coloured and Darvall was white.

Dr Marius Barnard, a member of the cardiac transplant team, was quoted in Newsweek magazine saying, "What I am most thrilled about as a South African, is that we could use the heart of an Anglican girl to put into the body of a Jewish gentleman and a kidney into a coloured child."

[edit] References

Newsweek, 18 December 1967, "The heart: miracle in Cape Town", pp 86-90.